For the past two weeks (beginning with the Monday of Earth Science Week) the GigaPan.org website has been featuring a bunch of Earth Science themed collections on their front page. There are still another couple of collections in the hopper, so you’ve still got a chance to see some of the “Geological GigaPan Goodness” on the GigaPan front page before it all disappears.

I’m working on compiling the full list of GigaPans featured in these sets. I wish I had a way of duplicating the random zooming image like you see on the GigaPan front page. Until then, here’s one from my recent Mineralogy class field trip to the Black Hills…

My own favorite tree is a Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) in the Lost Grove in Sequoia National Park, alongside the Generals Highway. It’s not easy to capture a giant sequoia in a single photograph, but fortunately I had my QTVR gear with me last time I passed that way…

Now you may wonder, what’s the geological angle? Well, it turns out that somewhere down under all that leaf litter on the forest floor is the Giant Forest Granodiorite of the ~100Ma Sequoia Intrusive Suite. How many other rock units are so intimately assiocated with a type of tree? The “macro” GigaPan below you can see a hand specimen of the Giant Forest Granodiorite. Zoom in to see the details of the mineralogy. How many minerals can you identify?

What… you mean I’m supposed to post the new WoGE challenge when I find one? It’s been so long since I won that I was beginning to forget. (Not to mention that it’s been so long since I’ve geoblogged it’s a challenge to remember how to make any post at all.)

Although I’ve been remarkably quiet on the blogging front I’ve still been surfing Google Earth and I think I’ve found my new favorite geological view of all time. There’s so much geological goodness in this one that I don’t feel so bad about the fact that it’s zoomed way in and at a low oblique angle. (Don’t like that? Then wait for WoGE #150.)

As always, the winner is the person who first posts the location of the feature(s) in question (latitude and longitude will suffice), but there’s so much good geology in the view that it’ll kill me if the winner doesn’t give it the explanation it deserves. Okay, enough talk… let’s see it:

No Schott Rule, since I’m not playing this round. But it’d be considerate if you got your geological explanation in order before you blurt out the coordinates, okay?